In some wireless system deployments the base stations reuse the frequency channels assigned to user equipment very frequently in space (also called aggressive frequency reuse). In some cases the same frequency may be scheduled to a plurality of user equipment for transmission and neighboring base stations may need to decode the desired signal within the composite signal from the plurality of user equipment on the same time/frequency resources, often resulting in high interference levels or low signal-to-interference ratios at the base station receiver. In scenarios where the interference is a significant impairment for the link quality between the base station and a user equipment, improved understanding of the interference (for example the one or more dominating sources, the statistics, the time/frequency/spatial distribution vs. transmission mode) could assist in assigning transmit frequency channels to user equipment, scheduling uplink resource blocks to user equipment, adapting the user equipment transmission mode, etc. Therefore it is desirable to have improved systems and methods for characterizing interference at a base station based on scheduling a transmission mode of a plurality of user equipment.